How 177 bombs came to rest under a children’s playground in England

London: Bomb dispersal teams rarely get called out to the picture postcard town of Wooler, in Northumberland. But in February this year, vans, diggers and the world’s media descended on the town, in the Cheviot Hills, coming to a stop where a playground used to be.

It happened after Steven Parkinson, a local builder, had been tasked with digging up Scotts Park in the town after the parish council secured a grant for the renovation of the play area.

As he set to work on January 14, a “suspicious” object caught his eye. He alerted Kerren Rodgers, the clerk of the parish council, who was equally baffled.

“Dealing with a suspected bomb in a playground is not exactly something they cover in the clerk’s manual,” she told the BBC adding that the authorities had nevertheless cordoned off the playground and an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team was called.

The team, dispatched from Catterick Garrison, confirmed the object to be an unexploded bomb from the World War II.

Whispers soon spread through the quiet northern town, though the council sought to reassure locals that there was no reason to be worried. Little did anyone know that this bomb would be the first of many.

Brimstone, a company specialising in removing wartime ordnance, was called in to start “delicate hand digging” and soon found another device.

On the first day, 65 bombs were found, stacked in rows, followed by 90 more, each weighing about 4.5 kilograms. Overall, 177 bombs were unearthed on the site.

Mark Mather, a parish councillor, described the removal of the devices as a “huge relief”.

“This was my local play park, I was one of the kids running around on top of those bombs, just nine inches below my feet,” he told the BBC, adding: “I don’t think we’ll ever find out for sure who put them there, or why, but I’m just so glad they’re no longer down there.”

Forensic teams have since revealed that the devices were practice bombs, which were not live. Yet the fuse and contacts were found intact, meaning they could potentially have been dangerous.

Given the orderly storage of the bombs, historians suspect the Home Guard, a volunteer military organisation set up during the World War II, buried them at the end of the war.

David Alexander, a professor of emergency planning and management at University College London, said there were millions of tonnes of unwanted ordnance all round the world, and “health and safety just didn’t exist” in 1945.

“It would just have been ‘let’s get rid of it’,” he said of the period of post-war exhaustion. “I mean, bombs had been going off for six years.”

It is also possible that the bombs were buried by regular soldiers and were being stored during the war until they were needed.

Modern methods of building require dig tests and cable avoidance tool scans which would pick up the presence of items such as practice bombs, but health and safety standards were less stringent in the 1980s.

A Northumberland County Council spokesman said: “Clearly this find was unexpected, but we are pleased to have been able to find the extra funding to allow this crucial work to be done safely.”

The Telegraph, London

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.